by Susan Cox
“And the village?”
“Sergei learned that a rural area near the Polish border with Ukraine was camouflaging a Serb training camp—intelligence we realized later was faulty and perhaps even deliberately misleading. Sergei called an airstrike against an area that turned out to include a small hospital, a school, and some homes. I don’t know who provided the information about the Serbian camp, but it was a catastrophic miscalculation. It broke Sergei. I have always felt his priestly vocation was some kind of expiation of his guilt.”
He looked at me thoughtfully. “Have you ever considered what a former intelligence agent does in retirement?”
I shook my head; it wasn’t an issue I realized had any bearing on my life until recently.
“With a few exceptions, we don’t have families, and the only people who understand what our life has been like are others like ourselves. We have skills we can no longer practice, and in any event can’t disclose, but we like to keep them honed.”
I thought of all the anxiety I’d suffered, and tamped down a rush of anger. “Are you saying—are you saying you all followed me for the practice?”
“As I said, I owe your grandfather a great debt.” He smiled again and showed some yellow teeth. All things considered, I preferred his frowns to his smiles. And I was almost sure he was lying.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
Before Grandfather and Davie got even one step closer to disaster, I needed to find someone who benefited from Katrina’s death. Even more difficult, the killer needed to be someone who benefited from the deaths of both Katrina and Sergei. Until I’d learned they were so closely connected, it had seemed unlikely that a single person would have motive to want such different people dead. Now it seemed a little more plausible that revenge was involved somehow. If Sergei’s son—Pavel—were the killer, the motive would have to be revenge because St. Olga’s got Katrina’s money, and Sergei was a presumably penniless priest. I needed to find out more about the mysterious Pavel, but if the spies weren’t going to help me—and it seemed pretty obvious they weren’t going to—I had no idea how to go about it. I walked down to The Coffee to talk things through with Nat and Gavin, hoping they’d think of something that hadn’t occurred to me.
Gavin made us hot drinks, and the three of us sat at a table, since the shop was empty. Finding a second body on our block had cut down on foot traffic considerably; Aromas didn’t have any customers, either.
I pressed a notebook open on the table, prepared to take notes if we came up with something. I pulled out the envelope I’d used to write down my list of potential suspects. It looked very meager. Gavin sat up straight and folded his hands on the table, while Nat lay on the couch stuffing a couple of pillows behind his head and wriggling himself deeper into the couch cushions. Gavin bit back a smile.
“What?” Nat said to him. “I might as well get comfortable. Knowing Theo, this could take a while.”
“Persistent, huh?” Gavin asked.
“You have no idea. Right.” He stopped wriggling. “I’m all set like Jell-O; what’re we talkin’ about?”
“I’m trying to think of who might have wanted to kill both Katrina and Father Wolf,” I said.
“Okay. Right,” Gavin said, nodding. “Um—why? I mean, aren’t the police working on it?”
“My grandfather is under suspicion, but he didn’t do it, so I need to come up with a more plausible alternative so the police stop suspecting him.”
“Your grandfather? Why would he kill Katrina? Did he even know her? Do the police think your grandfather killed Katrina because she was suing you?” He looked stricken. “God, I’m really sorry.”
“Well, no, he’s under suspicion for killing the priest they found in the vacant house down the block, but I was thinking the two deaths are related. Apparently, Katrina and Sergei knew each other very well in the past. Very well,” I repeated. “And Sergei has a son who lives somewhere in Northern California.”
Nat sat up. “Wait—are we sayin’ he’s Katrina and Sergei’s son?”
“I don’t know. It’s possible. But all I have is a first name, Pavel, and a town, Willits. Haruto can’t find anyone with that first name in Willits. He might have Americanized it by now, anyway.” After Haruto had more-or-less thrown in the towel, I had told Lichlyter what little I knew, but since I couldn’t tell her that my source of information was a former Soviet spy, I wasn’t all that hopeful she’d find him, either.
Nat lay down again. “Katrina’s lived here about fifteen years,” he said slowly. “And she was—what? About fifty?”
“Fifty-two,” Gavin said.
“So she moved here when she was thirty-seven, and there’s been no husband or child since she moved here.” He looked over at Gavin. “You’ve only known her for—what?—ten years?” Gavin nodded. “So if this Pavel kid is hers, and we assume she had him between the age of eighteen and thirty-seven, he could be any age between fifteen and thirty-four. Wow, that’s a big range.”
“I’ve been thinking of him as an adult,” I said slowly. “I didn’t think that he might still be a teenager.”
“Or he could be a man in his twenties or thirties,” Nat added.
“If he’s on the younger end of that range, it means Katrina didn’t raise him. He must have been fostered, or adopted.” I tapped my pen on the table. “Until someone finds Pavel, we can’t know anything for sure. Oh my God!”
Nat sat up and looked around, “What’s wrong?”
I shook my head at him. I had just remembered that Valentina said Gavin’s father had been a spy. And, as I knew only too well, spies sometimes ran in families. Gavin could be an intelligence agent. After all, we hardly knew him. I looked at him a little wildly.
“What?” he said, looking alarmed. I shook my head at him, too, and stared down at the table. And if Sergei Wolf was Pavel’s father, because Sergei was an ex-spy, Pavel could be an intelligence agent, too, which meant we weren’t likely to find him living quietly in Willits, or anywhere else, for that matter.
“Theo—what the hell?” Nat said.
“I can’t tell you,” I said. “Not my secret. But I’ve just remembered something else that gives me a whole new bunch of people who might hate Sergei.” How could I have forgotten the village he had wiped off the map? This was getting ridiculous—Sergei’s murder could have had a cast of dozens, a modern version of Murder on the Orient Express. But, again, how many of them would have hated Katrina, too?
“I need to narrow things down. St. Olga’s keeps popping up; could the motive have something to do with the orphanage?” I turned to Gavin. “You probably know more about it than anyone.”
He considered carefully before he answered. “There’s not a lot of money. Katrina was generous, but the sisters made a point of keeping expenses as low as they could.”
“But perhaps Katrina’s will made a difference to the amount of money involved?”
“It will be a large amount when everything is settled,” he agreed. “She had some investments, there were retirement accounts, and of course the building in Fabian Gardens. I mean, it adds up to maybe four million dollars or so?”
Nat whistled. “A nice little endowment. I wonder how come she didn’t leave anything to this Pavel, if he was her kid?”
“I don’t know he was hers,” I said. “To be fair, I was told he was Sergei Wolf’s son, and I drew a line from Sergei to Katrina because I knew they’d been involved back in the day.”
Nat shook his head faintly. “Wait—this Pavel was a priest’s kid?”
“From before he was a priest,” I said. I hoped.
He shook his head. “So we don’t know if he even had anything to do with Katrina?”
“I guess that’s right,” I said. “I just started to think of him as hers.” I tossed down my pen. “I don’t know much of anything for sure.”
We sat in glum silence for a couple of minutes, sipping our hot drinks. “Gavin, did you know she was leaving everything to the orphanage?”
Nat asked.
He smiled faintly. “I think she told me so I wouldn’t have my feelings hurt, and she explained that I’d get an executor’s fee. We were only very distant cousins. Our great-grandparents were brothers, I think. The link wasn’t strong, but after my parents died, she and I gravitated toward each other a little, dinner or drinks after work a few times a year, stuff like that. And it was a godsend when she let me stay with her. She turned into a heavy-handed older sister,” he said, rolling his eyes. “Always giving me career advice and telling me to set up a retirement account. I had to remind her I was a freelance journalist, not a lawyer with a 401(k). And then she asked me to help her organize the St. Olga’s project. She wanted to pay me, but she was letting me live in that beautiful apartment of hers, basically for free, so I wouldn’t accept anything. I was proud to take the lead on it for her, y’know?”
I nodded. “Why did you go over, this last time? Was there anything wrong?”
He shook his head. “It was a pretty typical trip. I know a bit of bookkeeping, so I looked through their accounts, checked into their expenses, and had a short meeting with the diocesan liaison. The house they lived in wasn’t new, and they’d had to do some roof repairs, which had increased their spending a little for the previous quarter, but I told Katrina when I got back that everything checked out; the kids seemed happy and the place was in good repair.” He rubbed at his temples. “God, I can’t believe that was just before she was killed. It seems like months ago already.”
“And there was nothing about the funding of the place that seemed, I don’t know, odd in any way?”
He looked puzzled. “Like what?”
“I honestly don’t know. It’s just that I know this group of people, some of them from over there, who seem to have an interest in the place, and I can’t figure out why.”
Nat pricked up his ears. “Who are they? More priests?”
“Far from it! But it’s not my—”
“Not your secret. Okay, I get it.” He settled down with a disgruntled huff.
In an obvious effort to change the mood, Gavin chuckled. “I told her if there’s anything I’d like to change, it’s that the nuns have been pretty slow to adopt modern dress,” he said. “Those long, black habits with wimples and veils down to their waists—pretty old school, but it’s not my call.”
“Wimples?”
“It’s the white headdress thing they wear under their veils to cover their hair and neck.”
He showed us one of the photos again, and Nat grimaced. “Yeah, that takes me back,” he said. “Modern dress might make the kids more comfortable, I guess, but their order decides on the uniform.”
“Huh. I don’t know much about Catholic nuns,” I said.
“Join the club. The trouble is,” Gavin said after a minute or two, “only St. Olga’s benefits financially from Katerina’s death, and it’s kind of ridiculous to think a priest or a nun would come all the way from Ukraine to kill her. Unless there’s some priest we don’t know about.”
“The body they found this week was a priest,” I said slowly. “And he had connections to Ukraine.”
He opened his mouth, then closed it again and seemed to be thinking. “Do you think he might have killed Katrina?”
“I suppose he could have,” I said doubtfully. “But he didn’t look like an assassin. He was sort of pudgy and his vision was poor.”
“You knew him?” Gavin looked surprised.
“Not really. He came into Aromas looking for my grandfather.”
Nat looked puzzled. “Why? Did they know each other?”
“I forgot to mention it. It’s a long story,” I sighed. “They knew each other years ago.”
Gavin opened his mouth and then closed it again.
“What?”
“Nothing.” He looked abashed.
“Out with it,” Nat told him, resignedly. “I’m probably thinkin’ the same thing.”
“What’s that?” I said.
He and Gavin exchanged a look, and Nat sat up. “Look, if your grandfather and this priest knew each other, who’s to say they didn’t have some old grudge goin’, and your grandfather did kill him?”
“Nat! Of course he didn’t. Sergei came looking for grandfather to get his help!”
“I’m not even gonna ask. Does Inspector Lichlyter know that?”
“I don’t know,” I said uncomfortably.
“Do they know any more about the—you know, the fingers?” Gavin nodded toward the empty space the microwave had briefly occupied.
“Could we not be talkin’ about fingers?” Nat closed his eyes.
“They belonged to the priest, apparently,” I said, ignoring him.
“But if he killed Katrina, then who killed him? And why cut off his fingers?” Gavin was looking as if he’d like to introduce another topic of conversation, too.
“I think the killer was trying to get the detectives to suspect South American gangs.”
“Is that possible?”
“I’m beginning to think almost anything is possible,” I said with a sigh.
Gavin looked at my list. “What about the legal cases Katrina was involved in? Maybe someone she’d beaten in a lawsuit or something? I don’t know much about Katrina’s day-to-day operations, but you don’t get to be that successful without making enemies.”
I wasn’t ready to move on. “Was there ever any thought of the orphanage dealing in, I don’t know, black market adoptions, or—”
He shook his head. “It isn’t like one of the big state homes, with levels of administration and places where things could fall through the cracks or happen with nobody noticing. It’s more like a group home. There are about a dozen children living there, and the population doesn’t vary much; I’d have noticed if there was a sudden influx of new kids, or several of them were suddenly adopted or something. Did you know her law offices were broken into?” I nodded. “That makes it seem like it had something to do with one of her cases. I mean, why else would someone break in?”
Obviously, I didn’t want to talk about that. “You said St. Olga’s wasn’t under the diocese but there was some kind of liaison?”
He nodded. “I sent quarterly reports to the Kiev diocesan office, although that was mostly just a courtesy because it wasn’t really under their jurisdiction. The liaison was usually a priest in the Archbishop’s office.”
“It wasn’t always the same one?”
He shrugged. “I guess they have turnover, like everywhere else.” He leaned forward. “There has to be some other reason for Katrina to be killed. What about the woman who bought the buildings here for development? Katrina told me she was furious when the sale fell through. Then when Katrina made her an offer less than Noble’s—well, I’d be mad, too. And don’t forget—the dead guy was found in the buildings she owns.”
That point hadn’t escaped me, and she’d already made the list. So far I had 1. Pavel 2. St. Olga’s 3. South American drug smugglers. I added: 4. Lawsuit Opponent. 5. Angela Lacerda. Mentally, I added: 6. Survivors and loved ones of bombed Ukrainian village, including, 7. Valentina Kompanichenko.
“Do you think the police are looking into her?” Gavin asked, and it took me a second to remember we hadn’t been talking about Valentina.
“I hope so. I’m just afraid they feel they have the killer already in custody.”
After we adjourned, I thought Gavin might be right about Angela Lacerda, and I hadn’t paid her much attention beyond feeling sorry for her. She was fairly young, and as far as I knew, she was on her own in the apartment. I rang her doorbell, knowing I risked having the door slammed in my face, but she hesitated only for a few seconds before inviting me inside. She was still wearing the lemon yellow socks, but this time she had no shoes on.
“I’m sorry about before,” she said. “It was a shock, and I lashed out at you for no reason. I felt as if things couldn’t get any worse, but I guess I was wrong.” She waved me into a chair. “I mean, who kills a priest? It’s b
ad karma.”
I untangled the religious implications of that. “You didn’t know him, then?”
“No, and believe me, the police have been talking to everyone I ever met in my life to try and make a connection, but there’s nothing to find. I mean, he wasn’t even from around here. He came a long way just to screw up my life even more.”
I looked around at her single girl’s apartment, with its refurbished furniture and the few “nice” pieces she probably planned to take with her to her marriage. “Will you be staying on here, now?”
Her expression hardened. “It’s a decent apartment, and I like the neighborhood well enough. I don’t have to put up with Katrina Dermody as a neighbor, anyway. Can you believe it? One of the reasons I felt confident about the deal was because I thought a woman wouldn’t screw another woman. Live and learn, I guess.”
She waved me into a comfortable-looking chair. “It must have been a terrible shock when Noble withdrew from the project.”
“I was furious—you knew she offered me about two-thirds of what Noble had agreed to pay before he reneged? I threw her out and told her I’d tell him.” She dashed away a furious tear from her cheek with the flat of her hand. “I did tell Noble the day before she was killed. He was livid, and I heard she was fired. Serves her right,” she added spitefully. “Anyway, even with everything that’s happened, I’ve persuaded Jason—our engagement is unofficially back on—that the buildings are a good investment and that we can make a go of things, and his family is coming around. I did plenty of groveling. and his Mama is even feeling sorry for me, a young woman trying to make her way in the world, taken advantage of by the mean old property developer.” Then she smiled. “I have really good survival instincts.”